Paying that off is a guaranteed 6% return on your investment with ZERO risk. And your billing cycle is 30 days. Yeah, I know you can pay it off after 1 day of interest if you want. Again, I'll set the bar low for you--call it a 30-day loan.
Has to be higher then 6% return -- capital gains tax and all.
Figure about 9% - 12% to be safe, depending on your tax bracket and state capital gains taxes.
I've been in computers for 20 years. I'm now thinking that, all along, this whole 'upgrade' thing is a pile of crap.... I'm not thinking of upgrading any more. I'm thinking "maybe its time to learn assembly, chuck away all this bloat, and push this metal really hard".
Depending on what you do, vi + mutt + slrn + nethack runs fine on a 486. MP3s will play on most 586-era chips.
What will kill you is web-browsing (P5 will do it for w3m/lynx, 6th/7th gen for heavy graphics/flash), compiling, video (6th/7th gen again, depending on the codec), and graphics. Many of the problems with P5s are that their motherboards don't support a lot of easily-upgradable memory -- firefox could run on a p5, but it will start swapping after awhile on common configurations.
In Minnesota, garbage collectors won't take computer monitors in the trash. They won't take TV's either, and generally don't want things like microwaves and other computer hardware either. I don't know if the laws are different up here, or perhaps due to Arizona being a drier state they don't worry about the chemicals leeching out.
A few years ago, I was talking to a computer store in Hibbing, Minnesota, about their computer disposal. Minnesota does have a law against dumping computers in landfills. So what their disposal companies did was truck it over to Wisconsin, which did not have any laws regarding computer disposal in landfills at that time.
I've heard numerous times that for the same power output, a nuclear reactor generates less radioactive material than, say, a coal fired plant. The problem is that the nuclear waste is in a big chunk, and must be stored somewhere. My question is, why not pulverize said nuclear waste and pump it into the atmosphere? At worst, we'd be doing slightly better than coal plants right? And we'd have solved the waste storage problem... right? I'm sure there's something I'm missing (other than the obvious: that's just insidiously stupid).
In opperating, the coal-powered plant releases more radioactivity into the surrounding environment than the nuclear plant, excluding nuclear waste.
OTOH, you are basically right -- we could drop slugs of nuclear waste into the soft mud of the ocean floor or in areas that will be submerged by another plate in a few million years. When I ran the numbers before, I think I came up with the figure that 50% of the slugs would have to be completely pulverized before we would match the natural radioactivity of the seas.
But idiotic people (especially "environmentalists") become upset. Idjits.
( This post brought to you by a hippy environmentalist vegan who is for nuclear power. )
Why is it that people are so scared of nuclear plants, i would find global climate change to be a lot worse than the ever reducing risk of a nuclear accident. I'd rather have a few square miles potentially ruined than a certain change to the global system.
Goddammit! Haven't you been watching TV! Its not the few square miles of radioactive land that we are worried about, its the mutants! The mutants! And perhaps the damned dirty apes as well!
When your house burns down, or floods, and your drives are underwater, including the backup drives?
Here is how I would probably do this.
First, check out RCS. You have one file, you want to keep a record of revisions.
Second, depending on how much I'd want to spend, I'd either back up to CDR once a week (keeping the old backup "off-site", say, on in my vehicle parked on the street, at work, etc) or else buy an online storage space for a few dollars a month.
A quick google search shows 50 MB for $3/month, which is a lot of plain text. If you are using some funky word processor format and/or images, half a gig is available for $10/month. It even supports rsync!
First, there is a lack of skilled computer people in any category -- unix sysadmins, Microsoft sysadmins, DBAs, coders, website design, etc.
In some categories (Microsoft sysadmins, website design) the lack of a clue is not immediately apparent to managers. In other fields (unix sysadmins) the lack of a clue tends to have immediate rammifications to management. [ Please note, I'm not trying to imply that MS admining is easier than unix admining -- IMNSHO, its harder, but that is another post. ]
The other main problem is that I see many people who are knowledgeable about admining OSS, but don't have the papers to get past many HR departments. They don't have college degrees or certifications, yet are probably more knowledgeable than the average MCSE (we can thank transcender for that!) and the average technical college graduate.
Finally, those who are knowledgable, and can survive the corporate HR hiring process tend to be expensive, CSS or OSS. You can find cheap MS sysadmins, but they tend not to be good sysadmins. However, due to the fact that MS tends to be nicer to those who set up flawed systems, it might not be obvious to management or the IT department that their workers are not as skilled as they should be.
Combine this all, and businesses get the impression that skilled MS IT people are a dime a dozen, and OSS IT people are rare and expensive, even though the reality is that any skilled IT person tends to be rare and expensive.
Just my $.02
Feel free to follow up with horror stories about your coworkers who are management's darling, but couldn't tell a sparc from an alpha.
1. Women, especially mom's, tend to vote heavily democratic.
A USA Today poll showed that married women tend to favor Bush over Kerry (54% to 41%) while unmarried women tend to favor Kerry over Bush (60% to 35%), before the last election.
I am continuously amazed at the ability of lawyers to run up huge bills. I've heard $200/hour quoted somewhere as an average, so I'll run with that, even though I know many charge way more.
For criminal law, the average fee seems to be about $125/hour [1,2]
For civil law, the average fee seems to be higher, about $150/hour [3]
You are off by at least $50/hour for a fee.
Now consider -- in many of the high-priced cases, you aren't paying for a lawyer to sit around all day playing golf. That fee goes for research and for expert testimony. In SCO's case, they'll need an expert on patent law, researching of all the patents in question, researching any prior art of the patents, and researching any decisions relating to similar patent cases. They will also need a research about the code in question, an expert on unix code, reviewing all unix code snippets in question and comparing their similarity to other code snippets, researching the origin of the code in question, and researching decisions about any similar code cases.
That requires specialisation, and specialisation in any field gets expensive. That also requires a huge support staff, which eats up the cost as well. In big cases, companies tend to go with the best legal advice they can find, the best lawyers, the best track records, the best education, etc, and that raises their average cost of lawyers.
Combine this with SCO's weak case, which will require more shoring up, thus resulting in more billable hours.
The legal fees seem more realistic now, don't they?
Those lawyers have done nothing for SCO and yet they have greatly enriched themselves from shareholders' money. Granted some of that money came from outfits with questionable morals themselves, like The Canopy Group, but that's also money that could have been invested in hiring software people to help improve their products and their competitive position in the market. SCO was once a reputable company, after all.
I'm guessing the lawyers are in the same position a coder or a webmaster is in when their client suggests something highly stupid, highly bass-ackwards.
You tell them the straight dope.
If they refuse to listen, you do it their way, and bill them.
Its a professional's responsibility to give their expert advice to a client. But if the client refuses to listen to that advice, then bill the client for doing it their way. Its the client's responsibility to listen to the advice and make the decision.
To use an analogy -- if you are a broker and your client wants to buy SCOX tomorrow, you might explain the potential problems with that purchase (mainly, IBM will crush them, resulting in plummeting stock prices). If your client still wants to buy SCOX, then you take your commission on the trade, and wait for the inevitable phone call from your client asking you how you could have let them do something like that (unless SCOX shoots back up, then the phone call will be about how much brighter they are than you).
To my knowledge, there aren't any similar large-scale studies on the consumption of pure nicotine (in the absence of tobacco smoke). I'd be interested to know if long-term consumption of nicotine alone (again, in moderate doses) has any health effects, negative or positive.
Nicotine does improve memory (google for the studies).
And you smoking near me in public isn't an attack on my personal freedoms? Specifically, the freedom to not have to breathe concentrated carcinogens so that someone else can indulge their drug addiction?
Considering that, on the grand scale of pollution, automobiles contribute a lot and smokers contribute almost nothing, are you also going after the drivers?
Smog is more dangerous then second-hand smoke, y'know.
Plesk seemed to have several issues last time I dealt with it, including the following:
Very tempermental to updates under one of the supported OS's (Redhat), to the point where upgrading some packages would break it.
Win32 releases would be sooner then Linux/Unix releases.
Lack of clear, clean update tools to move from one version to another, or from one platform (Plesk 5 on unix) to another (Plesk 6 on windows).
Never took advantage of native package formats under Redhat, which made it possible to clobber plesk quite easily. Sure, plesk used a unique directory for its files, but if a native daemon grabbed a port first, it would prevent Plesk from working.
And my personal pet peeve is that it never added its man paths for its packages to the system.
Disclaimer: The above is my opinion of Plesk. YMMV, and the most recent versions of Plesk (6 & 7) may be quite nice now. I wouldn't know, since Plesk 5 led me to avoid using their system.
"I recently went on a trip that involved many destinations. I had to use Yahoo Driving Directions which was not efficient at all. Is there a trip planning program (open source or not) for Linux?"
Obviously I need to hand in my geek registration card, since I'm don't see why a simple ink-and-paper road atlas won't work.
Lets review the advantages:
Cheap: Tends to be $19.99 or less.
Easy to use: As long as you have the basic skills of a chimp and know alphabetical order, you should do fine.
Theft-resistance: Nobody breaks a car window to steal a road atlas, as opposed to a PDA.
Very portable: The smallest models will fit in a pocket.
Easy to find/replace: Check the corner gas station or local mega-borgmart.
With "flashlight" accessory, can be used in the dark.
With "small notepad and pencil" accessory, can be used to write detailed directions (note, some thinking may be required.
Used by professionals: Many truckers travel thousands of miles and to unknown destinations using nothing more then a road atlas.
As long as you are traveling, why not pick up a road atlas? Just spend 5 minutes in advance to figure out your trip, right the directions down in large type so you can glance at them while driving, and record any landmarks before you need to make a road change (after Large City USA, I need to turn south on I3117). Then keep the most recent route change in your head while driving.
Um, no: "Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race."
At no point did I suggest Gentoo was 30% faster. It works 30% better for my application in a very specific kind of test. About which you know nothing.
And my invisible pink unicorn repellent is 30% longer than the competition.
If you aren't going to explain the tests or the statistics, then they are meaningless. Without the statistics, your post is opinion, and is about as meaningful, or meaningless, as every other opinion not backed up by hard data.
( I did mistake "raw analysis data" for "raw analysis data from timing runs". My apologies for that error. >4.7GB of data is very possible then. )
I'm getting scared. TVs, computers, LCD displays, mp3 players, and nearly every other kind of high tech device is made in China. Now they're leading the "new wave" into space.
If the Yuan ever floats (which would be due to economic/legal reform in China), then I believe that it would quickly fall in value compared to the US dollar, and the trade issues would change. I don't think that the current fixed exchange rates are sustainable as China's economy becomes a good fraction of the US's economy.
The other issue is the question if China's current growth rate is sustainable -- many predict it is not sustainable in the short term. Judging by the actions of the Chinese in regards to their money supply, they also believe that the current growth rate is too high.
Currently, China has a strong economy, especially in regards with most of East Asia, but with the gov't interference, and the above issues, it will be an interesting future for them.
Ahh, another step towards this lovely age of "if it moves, litigate it, if it doesn't, litigate its next of kin".
It's so pathetic. When does it all end?
When the nightly news decides that highlighting extreme lawsuits and creating a mountain out of a mole-hill won't increase ratings.
When people educate themselves about "frivolous" lawsuits and see that some of them aren't that frivolous[1].
When certain groups stop using lawsuits as the sole blame for increased costs[2].
When Americans realize that out of millions of lawsuits and thousands of judges that yes, there will be a few cases decided the wrong way and a few bad judges, but it does't mean that the legal system is flawed.
The very few times I've been in court, on either side, I've found that the US legal system seems to be pretty fair. Most of the "problem" cases that I've heard about seem to be, on closer inspection, not as clear-cut as one would think. Sure, there are abuses, but I wouldn't want to trade the US legal system for any other legal system in the world.
[1]Re: McDonald's Coffee Case, for one.
[2]Re: Medical profession, for one (or didn't you know that 5% of doctors are responsible for 50% of all malpractice claims?)
Gentoo (with -O3 and march=pentium4) significantly outperforms everything else. During run-to-failure testing, Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race.
Let me criticize -- I think you make an excellent example of Gentooism.
The only statistic you mention is "30% faster". According to you, Gentoo is 30% faster then Redhat and Mandrake. No version numbers are given, no meaningful statistics are given, no application is given, and, very oddly, Redhat and Mandrake seem to be equal in speed.
It has been my job to come up with performance alternatives over the past few months, and I have professionally evaluated Windows, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Gentoo in a lab environment with code that actually does something. I have measured output performance to the millisecond and have more raw analysis data than I can back up to a DVD at the moment.[0]
Pardon me while I question your honesty -- A DVD holds 4.7 GB of data. That's a lot of analysis data for timing runs. Doing some quick estimates with conservative figures, you have more data then is contained in a thousand Christian bibles, and that is not including any compression[1].
Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race.[2]
Nice windows flame. Windows has the edge in driver technology, and although plenty of applications on windows are slow, Windows itself isn't too much of a performance hog, especially compared to some vanilla installs of linux. But you don't give windows statistics for what you are doing...
The difference between -O1 and -O3 may certainly be rice (but I was able to determine that by reading the gcc docs), but Gentoo itself most certainly is not.
The difference between -O1 and -O3 depends on what you are doing -- some applications will show a significant performance gain, some will not. YMMV.
So, please prove me wrong. What were you testing? What version of each software? Did you try compiling an optimized binary from source under one of the binary distros and compare that to Gentoo? Did you include setup time? What hardware did you use. And please, tell me, how do you get over 4.7GB worth of timing data?!
[0]Quoting him out of order.
[1]This assumes the data is all text -- I can't imagine a reason why timing run data would not be text, but I'm sure a fellow slashdotter will enlighten me[3].
[2]Repeating a quote.
[3]Speaking of which, how many timing runs would that be for >4.7GB of data? I'm trying to solve:
timing_run_data * n > 4.7
And plugging the result into:
timing_run_time * n = total_time_required
(Using guestimated figures[4]) and the time required to run all those tests are interesting, to say the least...
[4] Say, each timing run results in 1 kb of data, and each timing run takes 1 minute of time...
Well-maintained older cars actually produce less pollution than a lot of newer cars. Strange but true (hint - the stuff from catalytic converters is incredibly nasty, the stuff from non-cat is less nasty but there's more of it). Plus, they're easy to work on, parts are cheap, and you can always get good used expensive bits from the scrapyard.
I recently calculated the pollution caused the manufacture of a brand new fuel-efficient Japanese car, and the pollution caused by the horrible (8) mpg my 1979 V8 truck gets.
I'd have to drive that truck 10 years to match the pollution caused by the manufacture of the new car.
So if we follow the map (assuming sea level has risen since Middle Earth days), mountain chain, south to Rohan, East, that would put Mordor right... about... Here.
"According to Tolkien, the Shire is supposed to reside at the approximate location of England's Midlands area (specifically Warwickshire), whereas Minas Tirith in Gondor is comparable to Venice, and Pelargir with Byzantium (Constantinople)." Mordor, it is assumed, would then be in Turkey or the Middle East.
Btw, this creature sounds a lot like the Orang Pendek, which is supposed to be a sort of miniature bigfoot, but, unlike bigfoot, some credible scientists believes that this creature might exist.
Interestingly, their location is supposed to be the islands off of Sumatra, which is part of Indonesia.
However, the Orang Pendek is supposed to be a miniature, bipedal relative of the orangutan.
Perhaps the Orang Pendek is a mixing of local history and of mistaken sightings of other tribes/primates. Or perhaps these "hobbit humans" are not the only miniature primates that have lived on the islands of the East Indies.
Perhaps it's not that special, but it's interesting. I don't know if you've played around with your car's electrical system, but they can be an absolute nightmare when something goes wrong. I had all sorts of problems with my first (crappy) car, mainly stemming from a ground cable coming loose. Auto electrical systems are not a fun thing to work on.
FYI, automotive manuals tend to include wiring diagrams which, horror stories aside, tend to be rather accurate. They include color codes for the wires.
Makes things a lot easier for, say, hooking up trailer lights, wiring in an extra cab fan, or figuring out why half the car doesn't have any running lights.
The other thing is that, when working on or nearby any electrical system is to take some masking tape, and mark any harnesses you disconnect. Then write down the harness on a spare sheet of paper/cardboard. Saves a lot of hassel upon reassembly.
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Paying that off is a guaranteed 6% return on your investment with ZERO risk. And your billing cycle is 30 days. Yeah, I know you can pay it off after 1 day of interest if you want. Again, I'll set the bar low for you--call it a 30-day loan.
Has to be higher then 6% return -- capital gains tax and all.
Figure about 9% - 12% to be safe, depending on your tax bracket and state capital gains taxes.
I've been in computers for 20 years. I'm now thinking that, all along, this whole 'upgrade' thing is a pile of crap.. .. I'm not thinking of upgrading any more. I'm thinking "maybe its time to learn assembly, chuck away all this bloat, and push this metal really hard".
Depending on what you do, vi + mutt + slrn + nethack runs fine on a 486. MP3s will play on most 586-era chips.
What will kill you is web-browsing (P5 will do it for w3m/lynx, 6th/7th gen for heavy graphics/flash), compiling, video (6th/7th gen again, depending on the codec), and graphics. Many of the problems with P5s are that their motherboards don't support a lot of easily-upgradable memory -- firefox could run on a p5, but it will start swapping after awhile on common configurations.
In Minnesota, garbage collectors won't take computer monitors in the trash. They won't take TV's either, and generally don't want things like microwaves and other computer hardware either. I don't know if the laws are different up here, or perhaps due to Arizona being a drier state they don't worry about the chemicals leeching out.
A few years ago, I was talking to a computer store in Hibbing, Minnesota, about their computer disposal. Minnesota does have a law against dumping computers in landfills. So what their disposal companies did was truck it over to Wisconsin, which did not have any laws regarding computer disposal in landfills at that time.
I've heard numerous times that for the same power output, a nuclear reactor generates less radioactive material than, say, a coal fired plant. The problem is that the nuclear waste is in a big chunk, and must be stored somewhere. My question is, why not pulverize said nuclear waste and pump it into the atmosphere? At worst, we'd be doing slightly better than coal plants right? And we'd have solved the waste storage problem... right? I'm sure there's something I'm missing (other than the obvious: that's just insidiously stupid).
In opperating, the coal-powered plant releases more radioactivity into the surrounding environment than the nuclear plant, excluding nuclear waste.
OTOH, you are basically right -- we could drop slugs of nuclear waste into the soft mud of the ocean floor or in areas that will be submerged by another plate in a few million years. When I ran the numbers before, I think I came up with the figure that 50% of the slugs would have to be completely pulverized before we would match the natural radioactivity of the seas.
But idiotic people (especially "environmentalists") become upset. Idjits.
( This post brought to you by a hippy environmentalist vegan who is for nuclear power. )
Why is it that people are so scared of nuclear plants, i would find global climate change to be a lot worse than the ever reducing risk of a nuclear accident. I'd rather have a few square miles potentially ruined than a certain change to the global system.
Goddammit! Haven't you been watching TV! Its not the few square miles of radioactive land that we are worried about, its the mutants! The mutants! And perhaps the damned dirty apes as well!
When your house burns down, or floods, and your drives are underwater, including the backup drives?
Here is how I would probably do this.
First, check out RCS. You have one file, you want to keep a record of revisions.
Second, depending on how much I'd want to spend, I'd either back up to CDR once a week (keeping the old backup "off-site", say, on in my vehicle parked on the street, at work, etc) or else buy an online storage space for a few dollars a month.
A quick google search shows 50 MB for $3/month, which is a lot of plain text. If you are using some funky word processor format and/or images, half a gig is available for $10/month. It even supports rsync!
All right, the election's over, SCO is dead . . . what now? Emacs vs. vi?
p.s. vi kicks emacs' ass
Ttrue geeks know its about ed.
First, there is a lack of skilled computer people in any category -- unix sysadmins, Microsoft sysadmins, DBAs, coders, website design, etc.
In some categories (Microsoft sysadmins, website design) the lack of a clue is not immediately apparent to managers. In other fields (unix sysadmins) the lack of a clue tends to have immediate rammifications to management. [ Please note, I'm not trying to imply that MS admining is easier than unix admining -- IMNSHO, its harder, but that is another post. ]
The other main problem is that I see many people who are knowledgeable about admining OSS, but don't have the papers to get past many HR departments. They don't have college degrees or certifications, yet are probably more knowledgeable than the average MCSE (we can thank transcender for that!) and the average technical college graduate.
Finally, those who are knowledgable, and can survive the corporate HR hiring process tend to be expensive, CSS or OSS. You can find cheap MS sysadmins, but they tend not to be good sysadmins. However, due to the fact that MS tends to be nicer to those who set up flawed systems, it might not be obvious to management or the IT department that their workers are not as skilled as they should be.
Combine this all, and businesses get the impression that skilled MS IT people are a dime a dozen, and OSS IT people are rare and expensive, even though the reality is that any skilled IT person tends to be rare and expensive.
Just my $.02
Feel free to follow up with horror stories about your coworkers who are management's darling, but couldn't tell a sparc from an alpha.
1. Women, especially mom's, tend to vote heavily democratic.
A USA Today poll showed that married women tend to favor Bush over Kerry (54% to 41%) while unmarried women tend to favor Kerry over Bush (60% to 35%), before the last election.
They praise HHGTTG (text-based game), yet I know several people who found that game very, very unfun, due to the gameplay.
Its not enough to have gags if the gameplay has problems.
Just my $.02
I am continuously amazed at the ability of lawyers to run up huge bills. I've heard $200/hour quoted somewhere as an average, so I'll run with that, even though I know many charge way more.
For criminal law, the average fee seems to be about $125/hour [1,2]
For civil law, the average fee seems to be higher, about $150/hour [3]
You are off by at least $50/hour for a fee.
Now consider -- in many of the high-priced cases, you aren't paying for a lawyer to sit around all day playing golf. That fee goes for research and for expert testimony. In SCO's case, they'll need an expert on patent law, researching of all the patents in question, researching any prior art of the patents, and researching any decisions relating to similar patent cases. They will also need a research about the code in question, an expert on unix code, reviewing all unix code snippets in question and comparing their similarity to other code snippets, researching the origin of the code in question, and researching decisions about any similar code cases.
That requires specialisation, and specialisation in any field gets expensive. That also requires a huge support staff, which eats up the cost as well. In big cases, companies tend to go with the best legal advice they can find, the best lawyers, the best track records, the best education, etc, and that raises their average cost of lawyers.
Combine this with SCO's weak case, which will require more shoring up, thus resulting in more billable hours.
The legal fees seem more realistic now, don't they?
Those lawyers have done nothing for SCO and yet they have greatly enriched themselves from shareholders' money. Granted some of that money came from outfits with questionable morals themselves, like The Canopy Group, but that's also money that could have been invested in hiring software people to help improve their products and their competitive position in the market. SCO was once a reputable company, after all.
I'm guessing the lawyers are in the same position a coder or a webmaster is in when their client suggests something highly stupid, highly bass-ackwards.
You tell them the straight dope.
If they refuse to listen, you do it their way, and bill them.
Its a professional's responsibility to give their expert advice to a client. But if the client refuses to listen to that advice, then bill the client for doing it their way. Its the client's responsibility to listen to the advice and make the decision.
To use an analogy -- if you are a broker and your client wants to buy SCOX tomorrow, you might explain the potential problems with that purchase (mainly, IBM will crush them, resulting in plummeting stock prices). If your client still wants to buy SCOX, then you take your commission on the trade, and wait for the inevitable phone call from your client asking you how you could have let them do something like that (unless SCOX shoots back up, then the phone call will be about how much brighter they are than you).
To my knowledge, there aren't any similar large-scale studies on the consumption of pure nicotine (in the absence of tobacco smoke). I'd be interested to know if long-term consumption of nicotine alone (again, in moderate doses) has any health effects, negative or positive.
Nicotine does improve memory (google for the studies).
And you smoking near me in public isn't an attack on my personal freedoms? Specifically, the freedom to not have to breathe concentrated carcinogens so that someone else can indulge their drug addiction?
Considering that, on the grand scale of pollution, automobiles contribute a lot and smokers contribute almost nothing, are you also going after the drivers?
Smog is more dangerous then second-hand smoke, y'know.
Plesk seemed to have several issues last time I dealt with it, including the following:
Very tempermental to updates under one of the supported OS's (Redhat), to the point where upgrading some packages would break it.
Win32 releases would be sooner then Linux/Unix releases.
Lack of clear, clean update tools to move from one version to another, or from one platform (Plesk 5 on unix) to another (Plesk 6 on windows).
Never took advantage of native package formats under Redhat, which made it possible to clobber plesk quite easily. Sure, plesk used a unique directory for its files, but if a native daemon grabbed a port first, it would prevent Plesk from working.
And my personal pet peeve is that it never added its man paths for its packages to the system.
Disclaimer: The above is my opinion of Plesk. YMMV, and the most recent versions of Plesk (6 & 7) may be quite nice now. I wouldn't know, since Plesk 5 led me to avoid using their system.
"I recently went on a trip that involved many destinations. I had to use Yahoo Driving Directions which was not efficient at all. Is there a trip planning program (open source or not) for Linux?"
Obviously I need to hand in my geek registration card, since I'm don't see why a simple ink-and-paper road atlas won't work.
Lets review the advantages:
As long as you are traveling, why not pick up a road atlas? Just spend 5 minutes in advance to figure out your trip, right the directions down in large type so you can glance at them while driving, and record any landmarks before you need to make a road change (after Large City USA, I need to turn south on I3117). Then keep the most recent route change in your head while driving.
Um, no: "Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race."
At no point did I suggest Gentoo was 30% faster. It works 30% better for my application in a very specific kind of test. About which you know nothing.
And my invisible pink unicorn repellent is 30% longer than the competition.
If you aren't going to explain the tests or the statistics, then they are meaningless. Without the statistics, your post is opinion, and is about as meaningful, or meaningless, as every other opinion not backed up by hard data.
( I did mistake "raw analysis data" for "raw analysis data from timing runs". My apologies for that error. >4.7GB of data is very possible then. )
I'm getting scared. TVs, computers, LCD displays, mp3 players, and nearly every other kind of high tech device is made in China. Now they're leading the "new wave" into space.
If the Yuan ever floats (which would be due to economic/legal reform in China), then I believe that it would quickly fall in value compared to the US dollar, and the trade issues would change. I don't think that the current fixed exchange rates are sustainable as China's economy becomes a good fraction of the US's economy.
The other issue is the question if China's current growth rate is sustainable -- many predict it is not sustainable in the short term. Judging by the actions of the Chinese in regards to their money supply, they also believe that the current growth rate is too high.
Currently, China has a strong economy, especially in regards with most of East Asia, but with the gov't interference, and the above issues, it will be an interesting future for them.
Ahh, another step towards this lovely age of "if it moves, litigate it, if it doesn't, litigate its next of kin".
It's so pathetic. When does it all end?
When the nightly news decides that highlighting extreme lawsuits and creating a mountain out of a mole-hill won't increase ratings.
When people educate themselves about "frivolous" lawsuits and see that some of them aren't that frivolous[1].
When certain groups stop using lawsuits as the sole blame for increased costs[2].
When Americans realize that out of millions of lawsuits and thousands of judges that yes, there will be a few cases decided the wrong way and a few bad judges, but it does't mean that the legal system is flawed.
The very few times I've been in court, on either side, I've found that the US legal system seems to be pretty fair. Most of the "problem" cases that I've heard about seem to be, on closer inspection, not as clear-cut as one would think. Sure, there are abuses, but I wouldn't want to trade the US legal system for any other legal system in the world.
[1]Re: McDonald's Coffee Case, for one.
[2]Re: Medical profession, for one (or didn't you know that 5% of doctors are responsible for 50% of all malpractice claims?)
Gentoo (with -O3 and march=pentium4) significantly outperforms everything else. During run-to-failure testing, Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race.
Let me criticize -- I think you make an excellent example of Gentooism.
The only statistic you mention is "30% faster". According to you, Gentoo is 30% faster then Redhat and Mandrake. No version numbers are given, no meaningful statistics are given, no application is given, and, very oddly, Redhat and Mandrake seem to be equal in speed.
It has been my job to come up with performance alternatives over the past few months, and I have professionally evaluated Windows, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Gentoo in a lab environment with code that actually does something. I have measured output performance to the millisecond and have more raw analysis data than I can back up to a DVD at the moment.[0]
Pardon me while I question your honesty -- A DVD holds 4.7 GB of data. That's a lot of analysis data for timing runs. Doing some quick estimates with conservative figures, you have more data then is contained in a thousand Christian bibles, and that is not including any compression[1].
Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race.[2]
Nice windows flame. Windows has the edge in driver technology, and although plenty of applications on windows are slow, Windows itself isn't too much of a performance hog, especially compared to some vanilla installs of linux. But you don't give windows statistics for what you are doing...
The difference between -O1 and -O3 may certainly be rice (but I was able to determine that by reading the gcc docs), but Gentoo itself most certainly is not.
The difference between -O1 and -O3 depends on what you are doing -- some applications will show a significant performance gain, some will not. YMMV.
So, please prove me wrong. What were you testing? What version of each software? Did you try compiling an optimized binary from source under one of the binary distros and compare that to Gentoo? Did you include setup time? What hardware did you use. And please, tell me, how do you get over 4.7GB worth of timing data?!
[0]Quoting him out of order.
[1]This assumes the data is all text -- I can't imagine a reason why timing run data would not be text, but I'm sure a fellow slashdotter will enlighten me[3].
[2]Repeating a quote.
[3]Speaking of which, how many timing runs would that be for >4.7GB of data? I'm trying to solve:
timing_run_data * n > 4.7
And plugging the result into:
timing_run_time * n = total_time_required
(Using guestimated figures[4]) and the time required to run all those tests are interesting, to say the least...
[4] Say, each timing run results in 1 kb of data, and each timing run takes 1 minute of time...
Well-maintained older cars actually produce less pollution than a lot of newer cars. Strange but true (hint - the stuff from catalytic converters is incredibly nasty, the stuff from non-cat is less nasty but there's more of it). Plus, they're easy to work on, parts are cheap, and you can always get good used expensive bits from the scrapyard.
I recently calculated the pollution caused the manufacture of a brand new fuel-efficient Japanese car, and the pollution caused by the horrible (8) mpg my 1979 V8 truck gets.
I'd have to drive that truck 10 years to match the pollution caused by the manufacture of the new car.
>> "The idea of how they got there is still very much in the air."
> They could FLY!?
Ah, I see the problem. They have confused hobbits with gelflings.
Easy enough mistake to make.
>> I have seen functioning humans with heads the size of a grapefruit.
> Yes, yes, we've all seen managers too.
No, he said "functioning", not "dysfunctional"...
Hmmm. Hobbits in Indonesia.
So if we follow the map (assuming sea level has risen since Middle Earth days), mountain chain, south to Rohan, East, that would put Mordor right ... about ... Here.
I've been told that JRRT based Middle-earth on a fictional period in Earth's own history.
"According to Tolkien, the Shire is supposed to reside at the approximate location of England's Midlands area (specifically Warwickshire), whereas Minas Tirith in Gondor is comparable to Venice, and Pelargir with Byzantium (Constantinople)." Mordor, it is assumed, would then be in Turkey or the Middle East.
Btw, this creature sounds a lot like the Orang Pendek, which is supposed to be a sort of miniature bigfoot, but, unlike bigfoot, some credible scientists believes that this creature might exist.
Interestingly, their location is supposed to be the islands off of Sumatra, which is part of Indonesia.
However, the Orang Pendek is supposed to be a miniature, bipedal relative of the orangutan.
Perhaps the Orang Pendek is a mixing of local history and of mistaken sightings of other tribes/primates. Or perhaps these "hobbit humans" are not the only miniature primates that have lived on the islands of the East Indies.
Perhaps it's not that special, but it's interesting. I don't know if you've played around with your car's electrical system, but they can be an absolute nightmare when something goes wrong. I had all sorts of problems with my first (crappy) car, mainly stemming from a ground cable coming loose. Auto electrical systems are not a fun thing to work on.
FYI, automotive manuals tend to include wiring diagrams which, horror stories aside, tend to be rather accurate. They include color codes for the wires.
Makes things a lot easier for, say, hooking up trailer lights, wiring in an extra cab fan, or figuring out why half the car doesn't have any running lights.
The other thing is that, when working on or nearby any electrical system is to take some masking tape, and mark any harnesses you disconnect. Then write down the harness on a spare sheet of paper/cardboard. Saves a lot of hassel upon reassembly.